For my second build, I went for the Rolex Explorer II Polar dial style, a watch that has peeked my interest as of late for its clean and distinguished look.
This build is an homage of sort to this beautiful time piece.
For some time now I’ve been looking into how to build a watch, both on Google and YouTube. I was specifically looking for a tutorial that would walk me through the entire process, from parts selection to the actual build. After several hours of research, I didn’t find anything satisfying.
Then I stumbled upon watch modding, which as the name suggests, is about taking an existing watch, and changing a few things here and there to make it your own. It turned out that Seiko watches are the most popular watches to mod because there are just tons of parts for them out there.
I didn’t want to mod a watch but rather build one…
So I decided to source all the parts to effectively create a watch from scratch. Obviously, I didn’t build the movement, but everything else was sourced from various websites so I could assemble it all.
With my interest in watches growing, I have started to look into modding, which seems to be the first step to watchmaking.
After a bit of digging around, it appears Seiko watches are the easiest to mod, mostly because there are tons of parts available for them.
Instead of bookmarking these and keeping them to myself, I figured it would be better to simply list all of my findings here for everyone to benefit from.
This is my selection of good quality watch straps.
I have made pretty significant scratches on my Panerai over a short period of time, which has caused me to stress about it and look for potential fixes.
But without doing anything in particular, I noticed that after a few days, some of the scratches had almost entirely disappeared, leaving just a faint mark. This made me wonder, is stainless steel actually capable of healing itself?